Ojai Debates Crackdown on Vagrancy

Officials in this peaceful, bucolic hideaway are debating how best to quell a big-city problem usually left down the hill.

At least twice a day, someone calls police complaining about panhandlers on downtown street corners.

Or transients using walls, trail sides or ball fields as toilets. Or hanging out at picnic tables and drinking in Sarzotti and Libbey parks, frightening the general public.

And so, members of the City Council on Tuesday will consider laying down some laws.

City Manager Andrew S. Belknap suggests that the council consider drafting ordinances that would prohibit panhandling in certain public places and outlaw alcohol consumption in city parks without a permit.

City officials say the problems involve just a handful of people and aren’t yet too serious. The problems usually go away when winter shelters for the homeless in the city close.

But Belknap tells the City Council in a report he will present Tuesday that without laws to ban panhandling or alcohol at Sarzotti Park, the city is at a disadvantage in responding to the growing complaints.

“We’re not in the business of harassing people that are down on their luck,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Johnson said. “But their problems become our problems when they infringe on other people.”

There wasn’t a panhandler in sight in downtown Ojai late Friday morning and into the early afternoon--just a slew of tourists in town for a popular quilt show, milling about in downtown stores and restaurants.

But don’t be deceived, say some merchants, who would welcome an anti-panhandling law like ones on the books in Ventura, Thousand Oaks and elsewhere.

There are just a handful of people panhandling, but it’s been happening often enough to bother shoppers, tourists and merchants, they say.

“We’re all aggravated by it,” said Stan Katz, who owns the Human Arts galleries in the heart of downtown. “It’s just a few people, but they’re here a lot.”

JoAnn Sedwick, an employee who was running the bar at the Hub, said problems with panhandlers are new to the city, and are intensifying. Some panhandlers have been brazen enough to knock on drivers’ windows, begging for spare change, she said.

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“We never, never were really bothered with panhandlers,” Sedwick said as she poured a patron a drink. “I’ve noticed them lately.

“We get a lot of tourists up here, especially on weekends,” she said. “I don’t want to be hassled if I’m someplace. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to subject other people to it.”

Police officials say panhandling and public drunkenness among homeless people have been on the rise for the past three years, since authorities first cleared the Ventura River bottom of squatters.

Problems have intensified this winter, Johnson said, after the county and officials down the hill in Ventura and in Oxnard booted people from their encampments in the Ventura and Santa Clara river bottoms.

Ojai officials believe that, rather than enroll in an intensive shelter and social services program at the former Camarillo State Hospital, some homeless people are opting for a comfortable system of low-key shelters and soup kitchens that rotate nightly among seven Ojai churches.

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“While the new county shelter at the former Camarillo State Hospital is an excellent facility, which is being well used by women, children and families, it is apparently not attractive to some elements of the homeless population, especially transient males with an alcohol dependency,” Belknap writes in the report to the City Council.

Belknap, who was away at a conference and unavailable to be interviewed, describes the city as a “friendly, caring place that probably makes for more successful panhandling.”

It all adds up to more begging, more litter and more drunk transients hassling residents and scaring tourists, Belknap writes.

Hence the proposal.

But Rick Raine, shelter administrator for the Ojai Valley Family Shelter program, said he can name the 12 or so homeless men and women causing all the ruckus.

Unlike others, he insists that the people causing the problems are not transplants from downhill, but locals.

Still, Raine said, he has asked nonprofit shelter providers in Ventura and Oxnard to stop referring clients to the Ojai shelter program. And when he sees people who stay in the shelter program out on the streets begging, he tells them to stop.

Meanwhile, people approached by panhandlers should keep their money, he said.

Some beggars use the money for bus tokens or to buy lunch, which is not provided at the shelters, but most will spend it on alcohol, he said.

“If people want to help, that’s absolutely great,” Raine said. “I encourage them to do so. Buy them a sandwich. Buy them a Coke. But don’t encourage them to stumble.”

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Others, however, are convinced that most of the people they see panhandling downtown are new faces, not the same handful of local homeless people that most longtime Ojai residents know by name.

“We didn’t have [panhandling] until they started clearing out the Ventura River bottom,” said David Mason, owner of the Village Florist. “It seems like that’s when it started, so I just assume they left the river bottom and came up here.”

The problem may involve just a few people, but Mason said the proposed law on panhandling is a good idea.

“I think [panhandling] gives the town a bad name. People and tourists can’t be comfortable walking down the street and having dirty and quite smelly people coming up to them all the time,” he said.

City Councilwoman Nina Shelley said she doesn’t believe that panhandling has become a big problem in the city, but that it is certainly bothersome, especially to shopkeepers who depend on tourist traffic for their livelihoods.

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“I think some people have the notion--and justifiably so--that people like to come to Ojai to panhandle and take advantage of wealthy people,” Shelley said.

“There’s also the thought that Ojai is a tourist community, and panhandling is a bad thing for a tourist community. . . . We will do what we have to do to restore the dignity of our community.”